My Legendary Girlfriend (11 page)

It began to rain as I walked along Junction Road and passed the Athena Kebab and chip shop opposite the tube station. There were no customers inside, but one of the men behind the counter stared at me menacingly as he diced cabbage. For some reason this scene seemed so ridiculous that I burst out laughing like some care-in-the-community patient.

Mr 7-Eleven didn’t look up from his magazine as I entered, but I got the feeling that he saw me anyway. Simon once had a job working behind the till of an all-night garage off Jarvis Road. He insisted that while working night-shifts he discovered an uncanny ability to predict the make and colour of the next car to pull onto the petrol station forecourt. It was pure rubbish, of course – the sort of thing he’d write a song about one day – but, I supposed, it was possible to find out all manner of strange things about yourself if you spent all that time on your own while the rest of the world was sleeping.

Walking past the magazine rack and the early Saturday editions of the
Sun
and the
Mirror
, I made my way straight to the freezer chest, opened it up and sucked in the pseudo-Arctic air. The smells and tastes of all the produce that had ever been there lingered like spectres: I could taste the ghosts of frozen peas; I could smell the ectoplasm of spilt Alabama Fudge cake. It was spooky.

The choice was limited: Raspberry Ripple, Chocolate, Vanilla or Tutti Frutti. Tutti Frutti caught my eye but I suspected – correctly as it happened – that it contained melon. I felt the same way about melons as I did about girls who said they’d love me forever and then dumped me. A box of no-name choc ices in the corner of the freezer cried out for attention but try as I might, they failed to seduce me, forcing me to opt for a tub of Wall’s Soft Scoop vanilla. You know where you are with vanilla. Its reputation, like that of Mother Teresa and Alan Titchmarsh, was spot free, which was highly useful, because at this particular moment, this close to the Edge, more than anything in the world, I couldn’t afford to be disappointed.

The man in the kebab shop – keeping his steely glares to himself this time – had ceased cabbage shredding and was locked in conversation with his kebab-slicing comrade. The kissing couple had gone only to be replaced by an old man with matted – possibly brown – hair protruding from underneath a lime-green woollen hat. His overcoat pocket was ripped and, even in this light, I could see it was heavily stained. The closer I came to walking past him, the more I began to think I could smell him.

He’s going to ask me for money
.

At the height of my political awareness – five minutes into my first week at university – I’d made a pledge always to give to the homeless, even if it was only a penny. These days – since Aggi had left me, to be precise – in spite of my promise and acute sense of guilt, I no longer felt obliged to be nice to the needy. This wasn’t so much a change in my personal politics as a sudden realisation that I didn’t give a cack.

I set my eyes to a steely glare similar to that of the kebab chap, but the old man didn’t say a word to me. I spent the rest of the journey wondering why he hadn’t asked me for any money when he was so obviously in need of it. That thought carried me through the front door, into my flat and right into bed – leaving the object of my quest untouched and slowly melting on top of the TV.

Saturday

11.06 A.M.

I woke up with a start. I deliberately didn’t move for what felt like a long time, trying to fake that just-woken-up feeling. I closed my eyes tightly, then relaxed them, repeating the action, squeezing out all traces of daylight from my irises, but there was no getting back to sleep. Instead, I pretended to be unable to move my limbs, and, after some moments of great concentration, even the slightest movement became an act of considerable determination.

Freshly squeezed thoughts dripped down from my brain, pleading for an audience. I put any questions re impending fatherhood to the very back of my mind.
Maybe I’ll wrap them up
, I thought, while slowing down my breathing.
Wrap them up and put a note on them saying, do not open
–
ever
.
Some things are, after all, better left unthought
. None of the topics for debate that remained – familiar faces all – stood out from the crowd, which was pleasing because mornings, especially Saturday mornings, shouldn’t be overwhelmed with stuff to think about.

Waking up the morning after the day Aggi dumped me – a Saturday morning no less – had been a terrible ordeal, not least due to the horrible taste in my mouth and the smell of sick on my pillow. I’d dreamt that Aggi and I had swum across a tropical ocean to lie on a Bounty chocolate bar type island. I clearly remembered feeling the sun on my back and neck, the sand clinging to my feet and the cooling sensation of the wind against the droplets of water on my skin. It seemed so real. Then suddenly I was awake. The essence of the dream only lingered for the duration of the journey from deep sleep to total consciousness, but for that short time I experienced the sensation I imagined others felt when they said they were on top of the world. Then WHAM! The nail-bomb exploded. Aggi was gone. She didn’t want me. It was finished. Over the following weeks, my first waking moments followed the same pattern – an overwhelming feeling of ecstasy followed closely by the distressing hollowness of reality. Gradually, the length of time it took for me to realise Aggi was gone grew shorter and shorter, until one day I woke up crying. By then, I think, the Message had finally made its way through to my heart.

I turned over, squashing my face into my makeshift pillow. It was too late. My brain was in gear. Saturday had begun.

I’ll have to tidy the flat
.

I’ll have to phone people
.

I’ll have to mark 8B’s books
.

I’ll have to sort out my life
.

I rolled over onto my back. Staring out of my left eye I checked the time on the alarm clock. I’d set it for 1.00 p.m. hoping to sleep most of the weekend away. The digital display, however, confirmed with its authoritative blinking eye that I’d been way too optimistic.

A huge, unnatural, pulsating pain throbbed its way across the front of my skull as if the rear wheels of a Shogun were running backwards and forwards over it. The severity and suddenness of this migraine attack had me worried. As I rarely got so much as a headache, within half an hour I’d selected a brain tumour from a list of maladies that included: beriberi, encephalitis and Lhasa fever, as the chosen explanation for my throbbing temples. Death by brain tumour was, after all, an unfulfilling way to die. While the most popular characters in soap operas got to die in car crashes or at the hands of mad gunmen, those at the other end of the scale were always written out after coming down with a mystery illness that, surprise, surprise, turned out to be a brain tumour. One bald haircut and a chemotherapy storyline later, and they were gone forever. This was exactly why I was going to die this terrible death. I was being written out of existence by a medical condition that was the disease equivalent of a pair of flares.

Attempting to endure the pain by diverting my attention to the state of the room, the thought entered my head that, possibly, a little bit of suffering would make me a better person. This wouldn’t have been particularly hard as, thanks to Martina, I was more overloaded with self-loathing than usual. Sometimes, I thought,
I’m born to suffer.
This, I noted, was the second time I’d contemplated Catholicism in the last twenty-four hours. I’d always thought I’d make a great Catholic. I quite liked Italy
and
found the smell of incense reasonably relaxing. If I had converted – from what I didn’t know – I could’ve been up there with the greats: Joan of Arc, St Francis of Assisi, William of Archway – patron saint of crap housing.

Fortunately for me, my aching head and the Pope, my mother had packed a bottle of paracetamol in one of the boxes scattered around the room. Lacking the motivation to phone Nottingham to see if she could remember exactly where she’d put them, I found what I was looking for, but not before I’d emptied the contents of all four boxes on to the floor. My hand was forced. Now I really would have to tidy the flat.

I gazed longingly at the translucent brown bottle in my hand. The name on the front, Anthony H. Kelly, was my dad’s. He’d had them prescribed for him when he’d had flu two years ago, which was precisely the last time he’d been ill and the first time in twenty-five years, so he told me, that he’d had a day off work through illness. The bottle was virtually full. That was typical of Dad, he loved to suffer more than I did.

I popped two paracetamols on my tongue and raced to the kitchen sink. The water which came out of it was brown and had been all week. I let it run – the two tablets now clung to my tongue like magnets – but there was no change. Cursing Mr F. Jamal for all I was worth, and myself for not reporting it to him the day I’d moved in, I managed to convince myself that brown water wasn’t poisonous, but in the end I lacked the courage of my convictions. I was nearly sick as I struggled to swallow the tablets aided only by chalky saliva and a stomach of iron. I could taste their powdery slug-like trail along my oesophagus and into my stomach long after they’d gone to work alleviating my aching head.

Now that I was in the kitchen it seemed natural to start breakfast. Today, I decided, was not a Honey Nut Loop day. Instead, I opted to create a minor Sugar Puffs mountain in the only clean bowl left in the cupboard. Sat on the bed with my back propped against the back of the sofa, I pulled the duvet over my legs and turned my attention to breakfasting. I’d forgotten the milk
and
the spoon. Too hungry to wait any longer, I grabbed a handful of Sugar Puffs to satisfy my immediate craving and shoved them in my mouth; they too clung to my tongue like magnets, but
they
were sugary, satisfying and instantly cheering.

There were no clean spoons in the cutlery drawer, so the only option was to wash one using the brown tap water. Though, technically speaking, washing in the water was not the same as drinking it, my qualms about its safety remained, so I over-compensated in the cleaning process by using three extra squirts of Fairy Liquid as if it were some kind of germ napalm.

Opening the fridge door, I searched high and low for the milk. There wasn’t any. It all came back to me. I’d thrown the last of it away yesterday, after pouring at least a quarter of its rancid contents over my Honey Nut Loops. There was no salvage operation. I had been so dispirited that I’d put the whole thing (bowl included) in the bin and had breakfast from the Italian newsagent’s up the road – approximate waiting time for a Mars Bar and a packet of Skips: four minutes. Now I was going to be disappointed again.

Fully aware that this day was doing its very best to torture me with the constant dripping of small, but perfectly formed disasters, I placed two slices of frozen bread in the toaster. I hovered above the slot until the heating elements glowed orange, as this week’s other little trick had been to pop in a couple of slices of frozen bread, go away for two minutes only to be greeted by – cue fanfare – frozen bread, because I’d forgotten to plug in the toaster.

Returning to the problem at hand, I tried to work out my next move. I couldn’t possibly eat a whole bowl of cereal without milk – I just didn’t have that kind of high-level saliva production in me. The other option was to dash to the shops to get some but, I suspected, if I was in possession of enough energy to ‘dash’ – which I strongly doubted – I’d probably have the wherewithal to have something more exotic than Sugar Puffs for breakfast. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the answer to my problem. I opened the tub of ice-cream I’d been so desperate for the previous night – now a rich pale yellow froth – and poured the contents of my cereal bowl in. Thoroughly pleased with my own ingenuity, I patted myself on the back and got stuck in.

Twenty minutes later, I finished about a third of my concoction and started to feel sick. As I lay back on my bed, letting the contents of my stomach settle, I listened to the postman struggling with the letter box downstairs. I got excited. As far as Birthday Cards that weren’t going to be Late Birthday Cards were concerned, today was D-Day.

Reasoning that it was too early for the rest of the residents in the house to be up, I nipped out of the door and downstairs in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, only stopping to put my shoes on as I didn’t like the look of the hallway carpet. There was a small hillock of letters on the Welcome doormat, most of which had been crushed mercilessly. There were yet more letters for Mr G. Peckham from the AA, a bundle of 50p off Pizzaman Pizza deliveries coupons, a postcard for the bloke in flat number four – Emma and Darren were having a wonderful time in Gambia – and a lot of other stuff I couldn’t be bothered to look at properly. After flicking through the pile twice I found four envelopes addressed to me and one for Ms K. Freemans. Too lazy to put the discarded mail on top of the telephone where it normally congregated, I created a very poor artificial post hillock underneath the letter box, sat on the stairs and opened the cards: